I am a biological oceanographer interested in the interplay of physical structure in the ocean environment, ecological interactions, and resulting effects on marine population dynamics, with particular emphasis on the early life stages of fishes. Because many larval fishes experience high mortality rates (> 99%), small changes in survival (through variation in feeding, predation, etc.) can have a dramatic effect on the abundance of juveniles and adults from year to year. Understanding these processes impacting the early life history of fishes requires observations across a range plankton trophic levels and spatiotemporal scales; however, biological observations have been limited to relatively coarse scales, even though physical oceanographers have been working with high resolution measurements for decades. The desire to understand the coupling of physical changes in the ocean to biological responses has led me to work with new sampling technologies, mainly in situ imaging and acoustics, which provide unprecedented spatial and taxonomic resolution of plankton distributions. Imaging, in particular, can produce novel insights into plankton and larval fish behavior under different oceanographic conditions.